Automatic server-side mediation for AppBrain Monetize interstitials

Mathijs Vogelzang
AppBrain
Published in
2 min readNov 7, 2017

AppBrain Monetize is a great way to earn money with your Android app by offering your users free apps to install. We’re rolling out server-side mediation, which increases the monetization potential of the AppBrain SDK.

We identified that not all users are a good fit for our app-install ads (also called cost-per-install (CPI) ads). For instance, some users don’t have enough free space on their phones for another app, have a weak internet connection which can’t download a big APK in a short time, or happen to be in a country for which we temporarily don’t have many CPI campaigns running.

This is why we’ve started partnering with a number of display ad networks and video ad networks to show display and video ads when those make more sense than CPI ads. The system operates fully server-side, which means that there’s no setup required from you.

The system works like this:
A user uses your app and your app calls showInterstitial or InterstitialBuilder.show(). Our server receives the request for showing an interstitial. The new server-side mediation system calculates what you would earn from an impression of the AppBrain app wall, and what you would earn from ads by our various display ad and video ad partners. The AppBrain server then picks the highest earning ad for you and returns that to the user.

We’re starting to roll out this feature for all traffic in the coming weeks. If your app has a recent version of the AppBrain SDK and you’re using interstitials, you will profit from the new ad types.

Ad type settings in the AppBrain dashboard

Ad type settings in the AppBrain dashboardIf you don’t want display ads or video ads to show in your app, you can disable them in the “Ad Settings” tab for your app in the “Publisher Apps” part of our dashboard. You can also see how much of your earnings are coming in through the alternative ads there.

Visit the info page if you want to learn more about AppBrain Monetize. If you’ve already integrated the SDK and want to show more interstitials now, check out the interstitial documentation.

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Mathijs Vogelzang
AppBrain

Building the top Android CPI network, AppTornado, AppBrain, Swiss Codemonkey